Young athletes dream in their innocence of someday playing in the NBA, NFL, NHL or MLB. Part of that dream might also include appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated, the most read sports magazine in the world.

Matt Gagne didn’t care so much about being on the cover of SI. He wanted to write the cover story.

The 2000 Spaulding High School graduate is living his dream. He has been working for Sports Illustrated as a fact-checker since 2010, and he occasionally gets to write a story for the magazine. Last month he wrote a piece called “Does Michael Vick deserve this?” on the much-maligned Philadelphia Eagles quarterback.

“I always wanted to work there and never thought it would happen,” Gagne said.

Gagne, 30, knew he wanted to write about sports when he was in his teens. He recalled watching a local reporter covering his Babe Ruth all-star baseball team play in the state championship in Keene. Gagne remembers sitting on the bench and watching the reporter do his job.

“That’s the greatest job in the world,” he said. “I want to do that.”

The long journey to SI began.

Gagne said he had good English teachers in middle school and at Spaulding, which gave him his early base. He attended Bates College in Maine, writing for the school newspaper, and then later as an intern at Foster’s Daily Democrat. He also did freelance work for the Lewiston Sun Journal, Portland Press Herald, Nashua Telegraph and Concord Monitor among others.

“I was looking for a paycheck,” he said. “My friends would go out partying Friday night in Lewiston and I’d be out covering a high school football game somewhere.”

After Bates, Gagne continued to write in Northern New England. He lived out of his car and slept on friends’ apartment floors or couches.

“My only goal was to pay for my health insurance,” he said (Gagne’s a diabetic), “and to be able to put gas in the car.”

Gagne got a job with the Boston Herald in 2005. His job title was EA (editorial assistant), but his main task was putting greyhound racing results in the paper. He still lived out of his car and continued to sleep on friends’ couches or floors.

Every now and again the Herald gave him a break and he’d get to cover something like a New England Revolution practice or Anna Kournikova playing tennis at Harvard University.

At that point in his life, Gagne’s relationship with his then girl friend and now wife, Rebekah, came to a head. Basically it was move in together or break up.

Gagne quit his job at the Herald and with no job prospects moved in with Rebekah, a kindergarten teacher in New York City.

Gagne didn’t work for six months. Finally in the fall of 2006 he called the Boston Herald and asked if he could do a sidebar on the New England Patriots at New York Jets game. The paper said no since it had all its writers already there to do a Red Sox-Yankees game the night before. Gagne didn’t let up. He pressed the Herald and they relented. They let him do a small sidebar on the football game.

Gagne was riding down the elevator after the game with a guy from the Daily News, who asked him how he worked for the Herald but lived in Manhattan.

“How does that make sense?” Gagne recalled the guy asking. “I explained my situation. He told me to call this guy at the News and two weeks later I had a job.”

It turns out the guy he met on the elevator covered the high school beat in NYC and was leaving that to cover the New York Mets. Gagne got his job.

“That took me from living on 86th Street and being afraid of 85th Street to seeing a New York City that a lot of people don’t,” he said. “I was in all five boroughs. I covered high school sports in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens. I was in some neighborhoods I wouldn’t have otherwise gone to; probably wouldn’t have felt safe in if I weren’t covering sports. My fear of New York City diminished quickly. It had to.”

It consumed Gagne’s life. The hours were long. At one stretch he worked 30 straight days without a day off. But he was in the door.

“They started throwing me bones,” he said. “There were so many teams. They needed bodies. I never said no to an assignment, for an opportunity to write. Not just there, but anywhere.”

Gagne never said no to any coverage. Eventually he was doing sidebar coverage for the Yankees and Mets and any other pro team in the city.

“That was a lot of experience, a lot of teams,” he said.

There were some memorable moments with the Daily News. Gagne was court side for the UConn-Syracuse men’s basketball game that went six overtimes in the Big East tournament. He was there in the Garden the night Kobe Bryant dropped a venue-record 61 points on the Knicks. He interviewed Michael Jordan and Pele. He was inside the ropes at the 2009 U.S. Open at Bethpage and standing near the green when Tiger Woods chipped in from the rough. He covered the Yankees when they won the 2009 Word Series against the Phillies. He got to go on the field and then, not so gloriously, wrote his piece on deadline on the floor near the pressroom bathroom — they was no room in the pressroom.

During this time, Gagne met Richard Demak, the SI chief of reporters and his current boss. He interviewed for a job at SI, which he didn’t get, but stayed in touch with Demak and kept sending him clippings.

In the summer of 2010, another position opened at SI. He interviewed, saying he would leave the Daily News and work without insurance even if it was a temporary gig.

He got the job and got his health insurance.

“The diabetic could get his insulin,” Gagne said.

“My philosophy hasn’t changed,” he added. “I never said no and I won’t.”

He also makes sure that when he travels he takes two weeks worth of insulin in case he’s on the road and the magazine needs him to do something else.

“I don’t want to be in a position to say I can’t do it,” he added.

Gagne said he got his love of sports from his dad, Larry, who took him and his brother, Tyler, to men’s softball games at Riverside Park in Rochester, and also Friday night football and baseball games at Spaulding.

“My mom (Doris) made sure my homework always got done,” he added.

Gagne continues to make connections back to Rochester and to N.H. He covered Freddy Meyer when he was in the NHL with the New York Islanders. Meyer, a New Hampshire guy who grew up in Rochester and Sanbornville, was Gagne’s Rochester Youth Football League teammate when they won the city championship in the early 1990s.

“He played right guard because he was too heavy to be a running back,” Gagne recalled. “We basically ran every play behind him. You could tell when we were 11 and 12 years old he was just a different kind of athlete. He ran every sprint as if he was being chased by a rabid rottweiler.”

There was the time he was interviewing Brian Sabean, the San Francisco Giants general manager and Concord native. Gagne mentioned he was from Rochester and Sabean asked if he knew Butch Emerson (a former Spaulding three-sport star from the early 1970s who now teaches and coaches basketball at Rochester Middle School).

Gagne also interviewed another New Hampshire native, Jed Hoyer, then the GM for the San Diego Padres. Once Hoyer knew Gagne was from Rochester, he asked if he knew Jamie Keefe, one of Rochester’s great baseball players (drafted by the Pirates in 1992).

“We’re on the other side of the country, but we have this immediate connection to Rochester and people we both know,” Gagne said.

This past August, Gagne was on the road for three weeks with SI senior writer Peter King covering a dozen NFL preseason camps or games from Miami to Buffalo, ending up in Green Bay. In some cases, Gagne was doing 20-hour days between coverage and driving.

Gagne had some time off in September and made it back to Rochester for a visit. Since then he’s been up to his eyeballs in work, mostly with NFL coverage. He did the Vick piece last month, and before that did a story on the NFL expanding its schedule to include Thursday games, as well as a story on Washington Redskins running back Alfred Morris. He is still doing his fact-checking and reporting for other stories. He was recently told by his editor that he will be covering the Super Bowl in New Orleans.

“It’s fun,” Gagne said. “There’s something new every day. But I love the writing aspect more than I love the sports. You have to.”

Mike Whaley is the Sports Editor for Foster’s Daily Democrat and the Rochester Times. He can be reached at mwhaley@fosters.com.